*1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Peter Sarsgaard, Chris O’Donnell, Timothy Hutton, Tim Curry, William Sadler, and Oliver Platt
Directed & written by Bill Condon
2004
118 min R
“Kinsey” is a triumph of substance over style, of “Importance!” over any sense of creativity. It’s precisely the kind of movie that is controversial and talked-about in its day but will descend to footnote status in the years to come. I have read at least one entire review gush over “Kinsey” that does not ever mention the movie itself—never mentioning acting, framing, composition, or anything. It is content with “because the man was important, his movie is important,” ignoring the run-of-the-mill Oscarbait biopic actually on the screen. It’s a “clockwatcher” movie, in which your eyes drift from the screen to the runtime counter on the DVD player.
I’m eternally grateful to the parts of Kinsey’s research that make it into the movie (although as played by Liam Neeson he comes across as a big-mouthed jerk). But “Kinsey” is tedious, ham-handed, preachy, talky, and, worst of all, smug and superior in its attitude towards the past, over “how dumb people used to be.” We are never immersed in the past, only visiting to taunt and laugh at it; “Kinsey” accepts the past on its own terms about as well as a Disney movie accepts animals as animals. The movie is the anti-“New World,” the anti-“Andrei Roublev,” the anti-“Master and Commander.” Among the parts of “Kinsey” that might have been interesting is how sex was viewed or carried out in the past, but the movie has such an enormous ax to grind that we regard everything it shows us about “the old days” with skepticism.
The director is Bill Condon, who made the equally “Important!” yet short-lived “Gods and Monsters,” but that was at least a good movie. As “The Great Man,” Liam Neeson does what’s expected in these kinds of films, but he could be playing any obsessive “Great Man”—Beethoven, John Forbes Nash, The Man Who Invented the Whatever, etc. The movie’s bright, informative (and fleeting) moments could probably be duplicated by a few minutes on Wikipedia. Laura Linney costars, and she is really beginning to get on my nerves for always playing “the wife of” in movies like this. A perpetual Oscar nominee, Linney is much like the movie itself: mistaken for a great actress in her day while her B-movie lookalike Naomi Watts does less recognized work that will ensure a greater shelf life.
“Kinsey” also commits the great sin of Oscarbait in which there’s a part of the movie in which someone actually comes out and says why the movie is “great.” If you go back and watch “The French Connection” you’ll come out feeling odd about it being a Best Picture winner. That’s because the movie never stops being a movie and veers into being about how great and important it is, unlike, say, “Titanic” or “Lord of the Rings.”
The third act descends into a delirium montage of Kinsey (and, therefore, really director Condon) lecturing us in different places to soppy music. Whether what he said was good or bad is irrelevant. This is lousy cinema.
P.S. Here’s a neat coincidence: I watched this movie and Todd Haynes’s similarly-themed “Velvet Goldmine” at about the same time, liked one but couldn’t stand the other. Both feature music by Carter Burwell.
Finished Monday, October 16th, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Friday & Saturday Night
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